Why is 20$/month absurd for something that boosts productivity? What does matlab coat nowadays? Sounds like he'd like to be able to improve it further and clients invest in that. Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads.. My opinions.

I don't want to pay $20/month for something that is probably going to be mostly unchanged after I purchase. That's like paying rent for tooling. I want to own my tools not rent them.

I'm with you. I think, it will have to not just boost productivity, but it has to be an improvement over the cheaper, and very good PyCharm. Given the talking points on the home page and here, the visualizations will have to be worth it for a given use case to forego the introspection and refactoring capabilities of PyCharm.

Productivity is a very vague concept, which can't be measured easily in most cases. So it's also hard to justify a steep price. And it's not like there is no competition here. Visualizations aside, this IDE seems very generic and basic in what it offers. So chances are good that you would still use a better tool, to not lose productivity in other areas.

And most important, if you stop paying, you will lose the gain from it. If dev screws up at some point, you might lose the gain from it. It's not really clear how updates are working. Are you forced to always use the newest version? Or can you stay at a specific version for all time? This uncertain factors and other, demand that the gain from a subscription is so immense, that you are willing to take the risk. And this tool here is not there yet, maybe never will; making it hard to justify a sub.

> Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads..

Youtube is an external service. You are paying for their running costs, which you create. This IDE is local, and there is no guarantee which updates will come and which benefits they will have for you. So there is no "running cost" you create for them.

Depends. MatLab's pricing structure is kind of all over the place.

That being said, I purchased a copy for personal use almost 6 years ago for around ~200 USD and guess what? I just installed it on a fresh PC a few weeks ago, and it works perfectly. No subscription necessary.

Reasonable question but I think people are just burnt out by the Silicon Valley pricing model that has proliferated everywhere.

* Most consumers now swallow a live service model and associated costs that they don’t want

* Most consumers now swallow the costs of west coast tech culture: cost of living, esoteric architectural choices, fad driven development, and hobby driven development

* Most owners of software businesses expect to get rich in a relatively short time frame

* Software is absurdly high margin if built effectively and distributed at (effectively) zero cost. Where do consumers ever see these savings when cost outpaces inflation?

* Record profits and layoffs being recorded by the broader industry

And specifically to the point of productivity tools inherently justifying nearly any price, this argument is fundamentally flawed because productivity is only measurable if it can be strictly defined and good luck with that one. Salespeople have made billions hawking that fallacy and people eat it up because American work culture fetishizes productivity.

This isn’t a critique of OP I really went down a rabbit hole exploring and appreciating this project and hope it succeeds.

The underlying business model of software is dystopian when compared to what it could be if everyone didn’t bind happiness to being cartoonishly wealthy in Menlo Park.